If you’re anything like us, you spend a lot of time adding new pages and uploading new files to your wiki. Over time, we — that is, you — have ended up with hundreds of pages and files. Probably. And you need a good way to keep track of them. Which would mean you are so very happy that you can use tags to keep track of all those pages and files. Because tags are a super-simple way to categorize and classify all those tricky little cyber-assets that it would otherwise be so easy to lose. What can I do with these "tags"? Oh, we’re so glad you asked. When you tag a file or a page, it’s like slapping a little magic LoJack on it that makes it come when called (if you’ll forgive our mixed metaphor). Say you create a page with an assignment for your students, and you tag it "homework." But, to do that homework, they need to download a worksheet. So you upload the PDF, and you tag that "homework," too. When your students look for "homework," both tags come running. Or maybe you want to get a quick snapshot of all the pages each member of your team has been working on. If you’ve all been tagging those pages as you go, a search will give you an instantaneous list of all of Terry’s pages. How do I tag something? Nothing could be simpler. For files, go to Manage Wiki > Files, and select Show Tags, History, and Size. The tags for each file will appear under the file name. To tag a file, click the Edit link under the file name and type your new tag. Once you’re done, click Save to save your tags. When you create a new page with the New Page button, it asks you right out if you want to tag the page. If you decide you want to tag an existing page — or change or delete tags on an existing page — you just click the down arrow on the Page tab and choose Details and Tags. You can manage the tags right there. Or you can go to Manage Wiki > Pages and tick the Show Tags and History box. There’s no limit to the number of tags you can add to a page or file, and no limit to the number of pages and files that can share the same tag. So don’t be stingy. Now that I’ve tagged them, how do I find them again? If you just want to track something down, you can either search or filter. To search for tagged files and pages, simply type the tag into the Search box in your wiki’s sidebar. You’ll see the tag listed in the search results. Just click on it to see all the pages and files with that tag. Or you can filter by tags to find the page or file you want. Go to Manage Wiki and pick either Pages or Files. To the right, you’ll find a list of existing tags. Just click the on you’re looking for, and the list will be narrowed to only the pages/files with that tag. Or, if you have a whole bunch of tags, you can type the one you want into the Find Tag field, and it will pop right up. You can also filter by tags when you’re adding a file to a page. On the right-hand side of the file upload tool, you will see Filter by Tag and Find Tag. You can use either option to narrow down your search. And you can always go to Manage Wiki > Tags to see the complete list of tags, how often they’re used, and the last time they were applied. …and that’s it? Of course not! Would we be so excited if it were? You can also limit to a single tag whenever you embed a List of Wiki Pages widget on any page in your wiki. Just enter the tag you want to narrow by in the Show Pages Tagged field. (I use this one myself. The To Do page on my wiki has an In Progress column that links to all my projects with "ongoing" tags, and a Completed column for my finished projects. Easy reference!) Or you could embed a tag cloud into your page or navigation bar. The tag cloud is a visual list of all tags you’ve assigned to any of the pages in your wiki. Tags that you’ve used a lot are BIG AND BOLD, and tags that you haven’t used all that much are little and meek. Hover your mouse over any tag to see how times you’ve used it in your wiki. Click it to get a list of the pages you tagged. And because we absolutely love tags, we’re always finding better things to do with them. Like— Ah, but that would be giving too much away. Trust us on this one, though: it will be pretty great. And we’ll tell you as soon as we can. If you’ve found other interesting things you can do with tags, leave a comment below to let everyone know about it. And if you have any questions, shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com and we’ll sort you right out.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2010, at 11 a.m. PDT, we’ll be holding one of our Private Label webinars. It is probably the best way to learn more about Wikispaces Private Label: you get to see it in action, and learn what it does and what it can do. But even if the overview and product demo are always nice (and they are), the heart of the webinar is the chance to hear from someone who is using Wikispaces Private Label in the real world — to see what they’re doing with it and get the hows and whys of their Private Label site. In this particular instance, Dave Dai will show us how Michigan State’s College of Education uses wikis for different organizations and groups in the college, as professors’ websites, as course wikis, for training and professional development… and on and on and on and on. Very exciting. And even if that’s not what you do (i.e., you are not a university), it’s still neat to see how a Private Label site can be used to cover a whole lot of ground. And, as always, we’ll wrap this party up with a round of Q&A, where you can get answers to all of those wiki- and Private Label-related questions you’ve been saving up. So that’s Tuesday, June 22, at 11 a.m. PDT. Will we see you there? Please say yes.

Rosemary Mitchell started the ART4Cast wiki in May, 2008. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I am the Visual Art Specialist at a model Title 1, urban school for 700 high-risk, low-income, majority ESL learners. Each class has visual art for one hour each week because of a Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program Grant, beginning in 2008. As a 27-year elementary teacher, luckily with a BFA, I was the recipient of this grant the year after receiving my technology certification with the eMints classroom technology program, where I used a wikispace for my 4th grade computer classroom. The only way to design, organize, and schedule this "NEW" art program was with a wiki. I communicate and plan with my 30 teachers successfully for this research-based grant through my wiki, because it gives them control of their scheduling conflicts and input on lesson planning. Can I just say, in two years, not a teacher in my building has missed art, because of the accountability that comes with the wiki. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? OK, so, how many websites have their own search engine? And wikis are so about sharing and not competing - what this century needs to keep the creativity alive that our students need to solve the problems of the future. I love the management of my wiki - checking page visits and analyzing necessary clean up. It’s kind of like a business - I want to sell some art teachers on my wiki by just being helpful and saving them some time. It’s all about sharing. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Through my wiki, I am making a heavy-hearted, true effort to keep creativity alive. My wiki is the best listening board I have. Not only do I use web 2.0 tools to keep me art teacher savvy, but with the posted lesson plans for my teachers, I am able to link lesson extensions for them to use in the classroom. With our 4th through 6th graders in computer classrooms, this has been well received by many of our students and produced increased meaning in their artwork. Many students access ART4cast from home - adding meaning to the site. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" First, when my computer crashed upgrading from Tiger to Leopard - everything important to me was on my wiki. Second, my 13 filing cabinets (full size and FULL) were struck with disaster. I didn’t even open them and no heartache - because I had my wiki. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "I’m so glad to see you finally grasping the skill of organization and simplifying your life. A good day spent is a day with you, because I always end the day more organized and with more to share with the world."

We always love day one of ISTE because it’s EduBloggerCon, the self-coordinated gathering of educational bloggers. This year we sat in on some great conversations starting with, appropriately enough, "Are Wikis Dead"? A provocative topic is always a good way to draw out opinion and experience and we heard both about how wikis are of real practical importance to many educators and also how new technologies are pushing forward people’s expectations of what wikis can and should be. Most of the other conversations we sat in on were opportunities for us to learn about the day to day challenges of the teachers we try to serve and as always we learned a huge amount. Thanks to Steve and his team for putting everything together and to everyone we listened to and especially those who introduced themselves to us with thanks and challenges. Read more about our presentation on Wednesday, party, and office hours all conference long. We’re also all over Twitter this weekend. You can find Adam as @wikispaces and James as @jbyers. You’ll also find lots of tweets under the event hashtag #iste10.

In late June, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a hearing on "Innovation in America: Opportunities and Obstacles." The result of this hearing was a renewed commitment to the promise of technology and innovation for the future of the United States. We like to think of wikis as a sort of magical multi-tool for building that future. Because they are such a simple, immediate tool for collaboration, they can be used for almost any application. And that is why we are very proud, although (with all due modesty) not entirely surprised, to learn that a Wikispaces wiki is playing a significant role in one of the Obama administration’s important Health IT projects: The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is an initiative for finding better and more secure ways to exchange relevant healthcare information among all the people who need it — between healthcare providers and healthcare consumers — in the interest of providing the best patient care possible. The NHIN Direct wiki is a forum for the collection of user stories and specifications and service descriptions. I suppose it goes without saying that this is an exciting time to be in technology, but I’ll say it anyway: This is an exciting time to be in technology.

It all seemed so simple in the beginning: You had your home page, and you made a few edits. Wrote some killer intro copy, added some pictures, maybe embedded a video or a recording of a welcome message. And, for a while, that was enough. Then, one day, you went and hit the New Page icon. The rush! The power! The endless possibilities! With that one click, you entered a world where your every need could be met. Where every project, every document and class and project could have a page all its own. Every student (or collaborator) was suddenly custodian of his (or her) own private URL that would take her (or him) right to that one, single page where all the work was. But, before long, those heady days gave way to sinking frustration and regret. Before you knew it, you had dozens, even hundreds, of pages in your wiki. What was a humble wiki organizer to do? Well, to begin with, you can set up Links to create master pages and subpages. Then you can edit your nav bar to provide simple navigation. Wikispaces doesn’t currently have a rigid page hierarchy. Instead, we’ve given you a whole mess of simple tools so that you can build a wiki architecture that suits the way you and your group work. Let’s take a look: Bring unruly pages in line First, take a deep breath. Then remember that you can always find a complete, alphabetical list of all the pages in your wiki at Manage Wiki > Pages. Now that you’ve had a chance to review the pages that already exist, it’s time to get them in order. Start another New Page. This is going to be your new master page, so give it a name that tells you exactly what it is: Math Lab Group Work, or Table of Contents. Add some explanatory text, images, videos, widgets — or not. Whatever you want. Using the Link icon, create links to your existing pages. Hit Save. Repeat as needed. Master your pages before they master you If the story above sounds like a fairy tale to you, then there’s still time. And you can start by creating a new master page. Create a New Page. As above, give it a name that tells you exactly what it is, like 2010 Newsletters. Create subpages by adding Links — see Sarah’s intro tutorial if you need pointers. Hit Save. Follow your links and start editing your shiny new subpages. Every time you need a new bunch of pages, just follow these same steps with a new master page. Or, if you find you want to arrange them in a different way, refer to the section above and change your links around. Pull your navigation together Just about now you’re probably noticing that all of your brilliant subpage architecture isn’t really being reflected in your navigation bar. That’s because, by default, we populated your nav bar with a Pagelist widget that lists the first ten pages on your wiki in alphabetical order. But never fear: it’s easy to change. Click the Edit Navigation link. Your navigation bar will open as if it were a normal wiki page. Delete the blue Pagelist widget box, and add in all the links you need, in exactly the order you need them to be. You can format the text if you want, or even add horizontal rules. Hit Save. Any time you want to change it again, just repeat these steps. And if you ever want the old Pagelist back, just Edit Navigation and replace all the contents with a Pagelist from the Widget icon menu. Know your tools You’ve already met some of the most valuable, versatile tools in your wiki navigation toolkit: Manage Wiki > Pages, New Page, the Link icon, and Edit Navigation. You might want to play around with some of the others: Tags. You can find out more about how to use tags in our previous tips and tricks blog post. Pagelist widget. This will put a list of all the pages on your wiki on any page, in alphabetical order, up to any number of pages you set, filterable by tag. Pageinclude widget. This will paste the entire contents of one wiki page into another. You can use it to create useful bits, like headers and footers, that you might want to use over and over in your wiki. If you’ve discovered a great trick for subpages and wiki navigation that we didn’t cover, let everyone know about it in the comments section below. Or, if you have a question or a problem you just can’t figure out, shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Your Private Label site has unlimited wikis. And each one of those wikis has unlimited pages. And the more people use the site, the more pages and wikis you’re going to have, and the more information your site is going to hold, and, unfortunately, the more difficult it gets to access the single piece of information you are looking for at a given moment. Building navigation into your Private Label site will help: links, instructions, and the features of Wikispaces Private Label itself will give you everything you need to guide your users effortlessly through a wiki environment that works the way you need it to. What do we mean by "navigation"? Well, we mean a lot of things. There are some tools built right into Wikispaces Private Label that make it easy for users to find the wikis they need and move between them without too much confusion. And you, as site admin (or even as organizer of a single wiki), have resources for building road maps and setting up road signs to tell visitors where they are, where to go, and where to find the information they need. Simply put, "navigation," means all those things, all the constructs and tools, that help you and your users move around your site and find the information you need quickly and easily. Your www wiki as map The first place that people see when they visit your site is the www wiki, which makes it the perfect spot to put up a map. You’ll want to think about how people use your site, and what kind of map they need. You could give them an atlas (say, an alphabetical list of wikis), telling your users and guests everything that’s in your site, and what it connects to, and where to find it. Or you could put up a treasure map, showing only the most important parts of your site, and only enough direction to get them there. Or anything in between. The Link icon in your editor toolbar will let you link to any page in any wiki in your entire site. (Actually, you can even link to any anchor in any page in any wiki on your site, but that’s another blog post.) Link to the Home pages of wikis that people will want to see in their entirety. Or link to individual pages where your most valuable resources are posted. If you want more instruction about how to set up navigation within a single wiki, check out our blog post on subpages and wiki navigation. Membership as self-navigation But we don’t want you to feel like you have to do all the work. In Wikispaces, individual users have tools to build the navigation that’s the best fit for them. User Dashboard: When a logged-in user goes to their account dashboard, they will see a list of all their Favorite Wikis. Any wiki that the user is a member (or organizer) of is automatically added to this list, as is any wiki they edit and any wiki where they’ve joined a discussion. They can also add wikis to the list by typing them into the Add a Wiki to This List box. My Wikis: The green arrow at the top of every page is a quick menu of the user’s top 20 favorite wikis. All they have to do is move their mouse over that arrow, and pick the link from the list. That’s the general idea. If you’ve found some specific tricks for setting up navigation in your Private Label site, please let us know about them in the comments section below. And if you have questions about navigation that we haven’t answered, just shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

On Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 3 p.m. (PDT), we will be joined by Ken Ostermiller of the United Church of Christ for an informational Private Label webinar. Ken is running a very successful non-profit Private Label site, giving individuals a place to share their thoughts and experience as they build a reference for the entire community. He will show us how he uses his Private Label site to make writing more collaborative, and to provide a forum where even non-writers can contribute to the composition of a valuable resource on practices. And, just like always, we’ll be there to walk you through the basics of Wikispaces Private Label, to answer any questions you have, and to satisfy your curiosity about what this tool could be doing for you. All of that, at 3 p.m. PDT on July 22. So… are you coming?

Hi, my name is Julie, and I’m excited to be joining the Wikispaces team as the newest member of the software engineering group. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in linguistics, and it took me a few years to realize what I really wanted to do was write code. Outside of programming, I spend my time reading, knitting, and eating my way through the restaurants of San Francisco. I’m looking forward to doing what I can to make your site experience even better.

Michelle Harclerode, Lee County’s 2010 Elementary Media Specialist of the Year, started the BookTrailersforReaders.com wiki in July, 2009. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I am a storyteller at heart. Last year at this time I discovered both book trailers (short digital videos which promote reading a certain book) and the world of Wikispaces. As a teacher librarian from Diplomat Elementary School in Lee County, Florida, I was excited to introduce both students and teachers to all that I was learning. The Web 2.0 concepts were new to me, but I was inspired to create a useful site for my own school. Book trailers on a wiki that allowed for student discussion seemed to be a natural fit. Originally I designed the site to introduce Florida’s best book list, known as the Sunshine State Young Reader Award books. My wiki started book conversations that helped to connect not only our school, but our district and even beyond to 40 countries. The long-range goal was to eventually teach students to make their own book trailers. However, things moved much quicker and our students immediately wanted to get in on the act and produce their own trailers. Creating trailers that can be seen by the world was a hook that engaged both avid and reluctant readers. Wikispaces became our portal that easily allowed students to produce, present, and publish. They produce using digital video tools, they present their book knowledge, and they publish to the global community. Web 2.0 tools, like Wikispaces, excite the learning process and help students authentically relate to the world around them. When creating trailers or book blogging on the wiki, my students would not only be engaged and focused, but joyfully exclaim, "I love that the whole world gets to see what I just did." 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I love the ease of uploading videos (either through my file or embedded widget) and then precisely changing the size of the video by switching to wikitext editor. I am slowly learning to manipulate my pages with the wikitext editor and create pages with a slick, professional look. This feature is an example of the many choices you have with Wikispaces. And the ability to control these choices is also in my hands as well. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? The discussion tab with my various book trailer pages has provided a safe environment for student blogging at the elementary level. I have set the permissions to ensure this and receive emails as soon as a student blogs. When students create their own trailers, they also assume blog responsibility for their book, and of course I am still supervising. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Two different times come to mind. One AHA moment time came when a librarian from another school said, "I could never get my kids to try the Sunshine State books and then they watch one of your trailers and the books just fly off the shelves." With wikis you are truly reaching out in ways you may not even know. The second happens off and on, when students stop to tell me they are reading a new book and they are going to make me a trailer so great that I will have to put it on the wiki. It will be "wiki good." 5. If you could ask, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "This teacher librarian really cares about the story and will use all the creativity and tech-savvy tools she can to get kids to read. Michelle Harclerode knows a wiki is a way to make real connections happen and that teaching digital literacy matters."

Over the last few days we’ve been incrementally rolling out a brand new editor to everyone who uses Wikispaces. While you may not have noticed a big visual difference, a lot has changed under the hood. This is the story of the third generation Wikispaces editor. Here at Wikispaces HQ we call this project EditorC, pronounced "edit orc." Pay no attention to the toolbar-wielding orc to the right. He’s really quite friendly. Earlier this year we took a hard look at our current editor. It’s a system that we largely wrote in-house over the last four years and it’s done yeoman’s duty: millions of people have used it to save tens of millions of wiki pages. However, a lot has changed in the world of web browsers since 2006 and in many regards our previous editor wasn’t keeping up with the times. We made the difficult choice to swap out the core of the editor for one based on the popular open source TinyMCE project — the same used by WordPress and thousands of other applications. Dom, Jeff, and Ryan have been hard at work on this task since then, with copious amounts of support from the rest of the Wikispaces team. So what’s changed? First, the editor looks a bit different. Here are the old and new toolbars: You’ll notice two new buttons: undo and redo. More on those in a future blog post! The new editor works better in more browsers. We’ve added Chrome support and greatly improved Safari support. You can find our full list of supported browsers on our help wiki. A wide variety of formatting quirks and bugs have been fixed across the board. We streamlined the look of the toolbar and buttons and made a dedicated area for notifications on top of the bar. Warnings when someone else is editing the same page will appear below the editor toolbar rather than in a separate window at the bottom of the page. Most importantly, the new editor provides the foundation for some jaw-dropping features to come. We hope the new editor works well for you. As always, we’d love to hear both the good and bad. Email us at help@wikispaces.com.

Many of you have probably noticed something new about your editor toolbar. Right there, between the Table icon and the Preview button, we’ve added two new buttons: Undo and Redo. So mistakes? You don’t have to worry about them anymore. Just click Undo. And click it again. And again. In fact, you can undo everything you’ve done since you started editing. If that’s your thing. And, for those moments of indecision, you also have the Redo button: Add an image to your page. Not sure you like the way it looks? Undo. Think it may have been better with the picture? Redo. Repeat until you feel secure in your decision, no matter how long that takes. They’re just little, tiny buttons, but we think you’re going to like having them there. You can read about the rest of the changes to the editor here.

Since 2009, Dan Maggiacomo has been using wikis to beef up the teaching toolkit for his blind and visually impaired students in Ontario, Canada. We asked him what that’s like. Building a sweet Wikispace is fun, mildly challenging, and certainly rewarding. Building one that’s accessible and meaningful for my students, all of whom are blind or visually impaired, has been one of the most positive turns of events for my teaching. When I set out to try and use Wikispaces, I thought "I’ll just throw up some notes so they can grab them if they miss them." That worked on one level, but if you’re not differentiating how you deliver and connect your students to information, you’re not doing as much as you could. With this in mind, I had my first light bulb moment. I made an audio note with my computer’s text-to-speech function and embedded it. Great, I figured, now the kids with low vision could sit back and listen if their eyes were tired from reading textbooks all day and the kids who use screen readers could hear a different voice for a change. OK, that worked alright. Now, I need some work in there! One of the problems kids who’re blind or low-vision have is finding information in pages of text. When you have the magnification set so large that you only have a few words on the screen at a time, or you can only listen to the text, it’s pretty hard to scan a document. So I started to manipulate the text to meet the needs of MY students, something that can’t be done with a textbook. The momentum built and I started to connect the Web to my Wikispace. Other sites, blogs, videos, podcasts, anything and everything that was accessible and meaningful I could gather in one spot. Brilliant! I could check and make sure everything is accessible before posting it, avoiding the dreaded "Mr. M, this doesn’t work with (fill in accessibility software name here)." Sweet!

Yes. "Page Includes." If this is the first you’ve heard of them, don’t feel too bad. They’re one of the things we built into Wikispaces that even advanced users might not know about. A Page Include is basically a widget that drops the entire contents of one wiki page into another. Which is pretty cool, because it means that you can build content once, and then use it over and over and over again. And it means that you can take large, unwieldy pages, and carve them up in to usable pieces. This gives you the power to do a lot of things. The following are only a few, to get you started: Bring separate pages together Maybe you are looking for ways to get a team to work together on a wiki. Each member of the team is responsible for a different part of the project. Which is great — you set up a page for each member of the team, and they get to work right away. But you also want to be able to look at all the work the team has done on one page. This is all you have to do: Make separate pages for each member of the team. Create a new page. Let’s call this one, "Team Project." Put headings on the page for each member of the team. Set the cursor under the first heading. Click the Widget icon in the toolbar. From the widget menu, select Contents of a Wiki Page. Type the name of the page for that team member into the Page Name field. Click Embed Wiki Page. Repeat for each remaining section, then hit Save. And now you have a simple snapshot of the entire project. Create editable page sections Now let’s say that, for the sake of clarity and convenience, you want the team members to be able to edit their sections from the Team Project page just as easily as they can from their individual pages. Just add one more step to the instructions above: Make separate pages for each member of the team. Create your new "Team Project" page. Put headings on the page for each member of the team. Set the cursor under the first heading. Click the Widget icon in the toolbar. From the widget menu, select Contents of a Wiki Page. Type the name of the page for that team member into the Page Name field. Check the box that says Editable. Click Embed Wiki Page. Repeat for each remaining section, then hit Save. Add headers and footers that change when you need them to Page Includes also let you build content that can be edited in one place and automatically updated all over your wiki. For example, maybe each of your students has his or her own page, and you want to make sure that today’s assignment appears at the top of every one of those pages every time a student signs in. Here’s how: Create a new page in your wiki called, "Current Assignments." Add a Contents of a Wiki Page widget for the "Current Assignments" page to the top of each student page. Once a day (or once a week) update your "Current Assignments" page. All the student pages will update automatically. Explore the possibilities Because Page Includes are just widgets, like any other widget, you can use them in almost any way you can imagine. Try combining Page Includes and page templates, to get pre-formatted, totally editable pages in your wiki. Or switch to the wikitext editor to customize your page includes with section titles, backlinks, and more. If you’ve already discovered something revolutionary that you can do with Page Includes, let us know in the comments section below, or send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Julie Ramsay started CoasttoCoastChroniclesEd1 in November of 2009. CoasttoCoastChroniclesEd2, CoasttoCoastChroniclesEd3, and CoasttoCoastChroniclesEd4 followed shortly after. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: After spending several years having my students correspond and work with students on the other side of the country, I was in search of some learning partners who wanted to expand to a much more student-driven and student created project. Our diverse group includes 200+ students in grades 2 through 6 from five different states and their seven teachers. We wanted for our students to use Web 2.0 tools in order to create, communicate, and collaborate. The students created an online journal, named The Coast to Coast Chronicles, on Wikispaces using a different wiki for each edition. For each edition that the students created, they discussed possible themes and then worked to create content for the other students which reinforced their content standards while teaching their audience. This project was driven and created by the students. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? My students really enjoyed how easy it was to embed their many different types of projects into the wiki from weblinks to videos and much more. Wikispaces proved to be an outstanding format for the students to publish all of their varied writing and Web 2.0 projects for our audience. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Depending on the theme for each edition, the young writers would brainstorm a list of possible project ideas that they wanted to create for the current edition of The Coast to Coast Chronicles. Much of the planning of each edition was done by the students through Skype and Moodle which provided synchronous and asynchronous conversations. They used tools like Wordle, Simply Box, Playcrafter, Wallwisher, ProProfs Quiz Maker, VoiceThread, Storyjumper, and Flickr to create content that not only reinforced their state standards, but also enhanced the content for the other students across the country. One project was a "wiki roulette" where all of the students across the country worked on writing one story together, editing, adding, and publishing. As one student said, "The cool part of The Coast to Coast Chronicles was that we had over 200 teachers working together and teaching us which is a really fun way to learn." The students really embraced the idea that through these Web 2.0 tools, they were not only participants, but teachers exploring and sharing new ideas and bringing their perspective, background knowledge, and experience to the entire group. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" There were so many Aha! moments while using wikis. I’d have to say that the biggest Aha! moment was when we had first begun our project. We were getting ready to upload all of the students’ work onto the wiki for the first time. In the past, I have always posted their work online on the class website. The emphasis being "I." Students would finish their project, load it to a pen drive, and then I would upload it in the evening or on the weekend for their friends and family to see. With wikis, the students uploaded their own work. They had the instant gratification of immediately seeing their work published which motivated them to keep creating and writing. They also were very mindful that once it was published others would be seeing it immediately, which spurred them into being thoughtful about what they created and the importance of using these tools to communicate effectively. Once they saw their work, they were eager to find another tool or create another writing piece for that edition. These writers were empowered with the entire process of their work, from brainstorming to publication. Wikis put the power of the entire process into the students’ hands. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? It would say, "These kids rock!" This project was totally about the students. The students took ownership and pride in everything that they created and they were always hungry for more. Their writing and communicating abilities, confidence, and creativity blossomed. It was a truly amazing thing to witness these second through sixth grade students. We gave them the power and they far exceeded any of our initial expectations.

The engineers here at Wikispaces labs are always looking for more and better ways for you to organize your stuff. Most recently, they’ve come up with bulk tagging for your pages and files. Give it a try: Go to Manage Wiki and select either Pages or Files. Check the pages or files you want to tag. Click the Edit Tags button. Type in the tags you want to add (hitting Enter after each one). Click the Add Tags button. And there you have it! Removing tags in bulk is just as easy: Go to Manage Wiki and select either Pages or Files. Check the pages or files you want to un-tag. Heck, go crazy and check them all! Click the Edit Tags button. Type in the tags you want to remove from those pages or files (hitting Enter after each one). Click the Remove Tags button. If any of the pages or files you’ve checked had that tag, it’s gone now. We think that this is going to be a huge help — especially this time of year, when so many of you are getting your wikis ready for new classes and the new school year. So go ahead and give it shot. It’s kind of fun! Let us know what you think below or with an email to help@wikispaces.com.

The Kuyu Project teaches young African students how to use technology to make a positive impact in their communities. The Kuyu Project wiki hosts their learning content and resources. We asked Simeon Oriko to tell us about it. In Africa, success is a communal effort, hence the proverb "It takes a community to raise a child." When we began The Kuyu Project, we were essentially looking at two things: Ease of use for our target audience who are high school kids in various African countries Crowdsourcing the content so that people can share the techniques and tips that have worked for them A member of our advisory board recommended Wikispaces. I loved the idea that Wikispaces was determined to help advance K-12 education and the vast amounts of resources that existed that would help achieve this including a free upgraded wiki (which Wikispaces kindly granted us). The decision to use Wikispaces solved our usability issue for our target audience, and it came with a lot of other benefits which we are benefiting from and still discovering to date. (I recently discovered the stats page which quite honestly makes my day!) Adopting Wikispaces is half the story. The work of crowdsourcing content about the various tools and techniques that these students can use to make a positive impact in their communities is the other half of the story. We believe that this task will have a major impact, in that by teaching kids to use technology-based tools and techniques, we are in essence fueling their dreams and ambitions — which may one day become the solutions and innovations that will change the Africa and the rest of the world. It’s an uphill task, but it’s doable… and it must be done for the sake of the future of the upcoming generation.

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that we’ve added a new option to your Widget menu. If you have a Glogster account, now you can embed your posters directly into a wiki page, without ever leaving Wikispaces, and without having to copy any code. Here’s how it works: Go to your page and click Edit. Click the Widget icon. Choose Poster from the Widget menu, then click the Glogster EDU logo. Enter your Glogster nickname and password, and click Log In. Pick the glog you want, and either Insert it into the page, or View a preview. Save the page. It’s that easy! We’re pretty jazzed, because this is the first widget we have that lets you embed media without copying and pasting complicated code and without leaving Wikispaces. But it won’t be the last. Let us know how it’s working for you with a comment below or an email to help@wikispaces.com.

Last week, while you weren’t looking, we gave you new permissions options for files and Private Label sites. Sometimes we’re sneaky like that. So we thought it would be an excellent time to give you a quick tips-and-tricks style review of your privacy and permissions settings, and remind you that switching up a handful of different settings (all easy to do, by the way) gives you an enormous number of options for the way your site behaves, and how people behave on your site. What kinds of permissions can I set? It depends on the plan your wiki is under, but, at best, you can set permissions for the whole wiki, and then separate permissions for every page and file in that wiki. (If you have a Private Label site, you’ll have more advanced settings for the entire site — we’ll talk about those in a little bit.) You can set your wiki permissions by going to Manage Wiki > Permissions and choosing one of the four options: Public: The whole world can see your wiki, and anyone can contribute edits, whether they have a Wikispaces account or not. Protected: You can show off your wiki to the world, but only active users with membership in your wiki can edit pages. Private: No one can see your wiki, or edit any pages, except you and the people you’ve accepted as members of your wiki. Custom: Pick a mix! You can decide who is allowed to view or edit the wiki, based on their membership level. But you can give any individual page more restrictive permissions than the whole wiki, if you want. Just go to that page and click the down arrow on the Page tab to get the page menu. Select Permissions. Once again, you have four options: Default: Leave the page permissions the same as the rest of the wiki. Locked: Anyone who can see the wiki will be able to see this page, but only you and other organizers will be able to edit it. Hidden: No one can see or edit the page but you and your fellow organizers. (I like to use this one for work in progress.) Custom: It’s up to you. Choose your own settings for who can view and edit the page. Wait, didn’t you say something about file permissions? I did! To change permissions on a single file, go to Manage Wiki > Files and select the file you want from the list. Click the down arrow on the File tab, and select Permissions. Then just pick your setting: Default: This file will have the same permissions as the wiki. Locked: If someone can see your wiki, they can see this file. But only you and the other organizers will be able to delete it or replace it. Hidden: Only organizers can see, replace, or delete this file. Custom: Make up your own mind about who can see or delete and replace the file. With so many options, where do I start? You’ll probably want to make some decisions about who will be using your wiki and how they’ll be using it. As far as permissions are concerned, there are four kinds of people: organizers, members, registered users, and everyone else. Make sure that you’ve assigned membership — and the right type of membership — to all the right people. Now you just tweak the settings for your wiki, pages, and files. You can find some of the more popular permissions settings scenarios on our Privacy help page. What if I have a Private Label site? If you’re on Wikispaces Private Label, then, on top of all this, you also have permissions settings for your whole site. Just go to Site Administration > Settings > Users & Privacy. You’ve probably already played with this a bit, deciding who’s allowed to see your site, and who can create new accounts, and turning your messaging system on an off, and some other things. But if it’s been a while since you last adjusted your settings, you might want to check in on some of our recent Private Label permissions upgrades: Allow user account creation by domain: If you know that you’ll be approving every account request that comes from an email address within your school or company, anyway, save yourself time by automatically approving that email address domain. As soon as the user confirms their email address, their account will be active. Grant guest access by IP address: Maybe you don’t want your site to be visible to the entire world, but you also don’t think that every person in your building needs an account to look at their wikis. You can white list your building’s IP address, and everyone in the building gets an automatic guest pass. Easy! Honestly, when it comes to permissions, there’s a lot of ground to cover. I hope this has given you at least a taste of the possibilities. Our Privacy help page goes over this in some more detail.

Kim Grady started the TechMaker wiki in July, 2009. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: We are a group of scientific, industry, and education professionals who are seeking to overcome barriers to bringing new technology to market. Our project is one of many under the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative of the Department of Labor. We used tech transfer concepts to develop the wiki’s organization and framework, and wiki templates to pre-populate pages with standard reoccurring content that guides pedagogy specific to our audiences. We initially gathered about 200 existing resources in the wiki, cataloged them, and then began shaping them for classroom/training room delivery. Educators are participating in pilot programs to use the wiki delivered content in their existing business and technology courses. Specific entrepreneur groups are starting to add their blog content to the wiki for development of new curriculum and ideas. The wiki format allows us to bring together dynamic curriculum and processes for teaching tech transfer concepts. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? The tag cloud because it affords a great way to manage and navigate the content, the tags were developed from the mapped tech transfer concepts, the concepts are kind of the backbone of the wiki delivered content and its organization. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? A process and technique was developed that utilizes interactive concept mapping and wikis. The maps helped build a user defined logic/context for the curriculum and the wiki platform supports formatting and linking the associated content for dissemination. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Since day one I have been a wiki fan; I never blogged, wikis give me the flexibility I need to work with my clients. I’ll use the words of one of the participants in the project as an aha moment, when I knew the project participants were seeing what I see in wikis. She said, "We are really creating something dynamic but directive here, that’s a good thing." 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Ah, this kind of goes with #4, I think my wiki would say, "They will see the power of what you are creating, don’t sweat it."

A wiki is something that a whole bunch of people can be looking at, at the same time, from anywhere in the world. And those people can be reading the same things, and watching the same video clips, and following the same links, and, through the magic of the Discussion tab, sharing comments, all at the same time. Of course you already know this. And some of you have already figured out that you can use your wiki in conjunction with the web conferencing tools you already have, and conduct online seminars right from your wiki. So what would make more sense than using that capacity for presenting from a wiki to run your wiki training? Recently we put together this Professional Development wiki for educators and educational technologists who are looking for tools that will help them demonstrate how to use wikis, and to show what a powerful tool wikis can be. Even if you’re not an educator, though, you could adapt some of the talking points and activities to your own needs. If you want to give this presentation from your own wiki — or if you’ve developed other wiki presentation and training tools that you want to share with us — email us at help@wikispaces.com.

Since it’s the last Monday of the month, we wanted to take a look at some of the cool Wikispaces-related things that people have been talking about this month. Here are some of the highlights from September: Canterbury Earthquake On September 4, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck the South Island of New Zealand. The earthquake-shakeup wiki was created in response to that, so everyone could share their stories, experiences, and ideas. Here are some of the comments that were posted to Twitter: Digistore: Digistore Earthquake Collection on http://earthquake-shakeup.wikispaces.com/Learning+about+Earthquakes Allanah K: If you want to help with earthquake relief for schools in Christchurch register your interest http://earthquake-shakeup.wikispaces.com/ Suzie Vesper: Join in Skype interviews with people from ChCh, NZ who experienced the 7.1 quake. Details on wiki page http://tinyurl.com/298r4vt Glogster Widget This month, we released a new widget that makes it easier to integrate glogs into your wikis. We announced it on September 9, but you all scooped us: GlogsterEDU: Spice up your Wikispaces with Glogs Free Technology for Teachers: Wikispaces Makes it Easier to Embed Glogs The Unquiet Library: Mrs. Frost and Freshmen Master the Art of the Glogster Widget in Wikispaces! Resources for Teachers It looks like a lot of you are using wikis to share your techniques and favorite resources. Here a few that you tweeted about: David Wilcox: Social media training with @stephendale and amazed yet again by his great online resource http://socialmediatoolkit.wikispaces.com/ Saitech Informatics: http://50ideas.wikispaces.com/Science+Websites Jamie Menning Regier: Fantastic Teaching Resources! http://21stcenturyconcepts.wikispaces.com/ Cool Projects And, of course, as much as it’s never a surprise to learn that you’re doing cool things with wikis, it’s always a blast to see those projects first-hand. Here are a few that you shared with the world: Community News of Virginia: Campbell County announces first "Campbell County Reads" program kditzler: WOW! I already have 8 classes signed up for the Fall Progressive Story Project: http://writeyourstory.wikispaces.com/ Want to join us? Dorie Glynn: Global Project: The Green School Project http://newsproject.wikispaces.com/Green+School+Project #edchat #elemchat Colette Cassinelli: Join a collaborative YA book project Go to http://10-10-10.wikispaces.com/ to nominate your top ten YA novels - a great class project! We’re already excited about October!

The EWU Career wiki is a valuable online resource for Eastern Washington University students and alumni — and it’s a beautiful wiki with a sense of fun. We asked Dan Martensen to tell us about it. The Eastern Washington University (EWU) career wiki is a collaboration between EWU Libraries and EWU Career services to create a one-stop-shopping experience for students and alumni looking for career-related information online. The project was funded through a Renew Washington grant of the Washington State Library using funds from the Institute of Museum & Library Services. Two goals for the wiki’s content and design were to select quality career resources relevant and available to our audiences and to present the wiki resources in a highly usable and appealing format. After systematically evaluating various wiki platforms available, we chose Wikispaces for its customization, storage capacity, security, and cost-effectiveness. The project team, made up of two EWU students hired with grant funds, brainstormed college-oriented themes for the wiki design. Ninety minutes into our whiteboard brainstorm session, one of those "Ah ha" moments occurred—and we hit upon the idea of using a smart phone interface as the design metaphor. Smart phones are similar to our wiki: collaborative, dynamic, visually attractive, and easy to use. On the technical side, wikis and smart phones both use a graphic interface, are organized with sub pages, and enable tremendous creativity. Project stakeholders (managers from the library and Career Services) loved the design idea. My coworker and I developed the wiki over the next few months. Having a background in graphic design, my coworker created the "app" icons full of rich colors and textures, as well as built the "phone" framework of the wiki using HTML and CSS. I selected and organized the content, incorporating internal and external links. The success of our project hinged upon a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, use of graphic design software, and the willingness to go back to the drawing board repeatedly. I hope our wiki encourages more innovative design ideas using Wikispaces’ custom themes.

You started your wiki for a reason. Maybe you were looking for ways to get your students more excited about their work. Or you wanted a place to post announcements for your community. Or possibly you needed a spot to organize a really important event. No matter what your specific reason was, you chose a wiki because you knew it was a collaborative tool, and that was what you wanted. The main thing about collaborative tools is that you need them when you’re working with other people. And, if you’re working with other people, odds are you’ve found yourself asking how those other people are using the wiki. And that moment, when you ask that question, is when you are ready to check out your wiki stats. What exactly are "wiki stats"? Numbers. Fabulous, fabulous numbers. The kinds of numbers that tell you how many people visited your wiki, and which pages they looked at, and how many edits they made, and what countries they came from. To see what I mean, go to Manage Wiki > Wiki Statistics. There you’ll see a bunch of graphs, with lots of fun information: Views Unique visitors Edits Messages Editors Top 10 countries by percentage of visits When you get to this page, you’ll be looking at the numbers for the current month, but you can always change the dates to see the data for a different month — or even for an entire year. And any of the information you see here — and of the information anywhere in your wiki stats — can be downloaded as a .csv (comma separated value) file. Neat. What else can I do? Click on the Pages tab. Now you get a little more detail about how people are using your site. This is a list of all the pages in your wiki, and how many times they’ve been viewed. And, just like the wiki stats overview tab, you can change the date range (and download a .csv file), so you get all the information you need. Next, click the Members tab. Now you’re looking at all the members of your wiki, and you get to see how many edits they’ve made and how many messages they’ve left. Click on any number, and you’ll see a list of all the edits or posts the the member made within the dates you entered. That’s a lot of great information, but what can I do with it? That part depends on what you want to do with your wiki. If you’re a teacher, these numbers will help you monitor individual students. You can dig a little deeper into how they’re working and behaving on the wiki, and it gives you a way to evaluate students and the work they do over a semester. If you’re organizing a large event — say, a conference, or a gala event — wiki stats will let you see activity on the wiki as soon as it goes live. You can see how many visitors you’re getting, which pages they’re interested in, even which countries they’re coming from. Or let’s say you have a really big wiki, and you’re reevaluating how you use it. Wiki stats make it easy to see which pages are the most important for your community — just check out the number of views on the Pages tab. Whatever it is you use your wiki to do, knowing how to read your wiki statistics can help you get a clearer picture of how it’s working. If you want to know more about your stats, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.